Will I get the full speed from a ATI 9700 PRO with an AMD Athlon 2200+?

[ANTant]

Since I am upgrading my video card once a year or so, I was wondering
if ATI 9700 is a little too much for my 1 year old CPU. You can see my
current system setup (primary computer) at
http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt ... I play a
lot of computer games, especially newer games. I am a type of guys
who likes to crank everything up (FSAA, details, etc.) at 1152x864
resolution. Also, will 9800 make a difference on my system? I probably
will upgrade my CPU system next Fall (2004).

Thank you in advance.

--
"Lay a stick of bubble gum on an anthill for instant Siamese Ant
Twins." --unknown
/\___/\
/ /\ /\ \ Ant @ The Ant Farm: http://antfarm.ma.cx
| |o o| | E-mail: (e-mail address removed) or (e-mail address removed)
\ _ / Remove ANT if replying by e-mail from a newsgroup.
( )

 

[MadDAWG]

Since I am upgrading my video card once a year or so, I was wondering
if ATI 9700 is a little too much for my 1 year old CPU. You can see my
current system setup (primary computer) at
http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt ... I play a
lot of computer games, especially newer games. I am a type of guys
who likes to crank everything up (FSAA, details, etc.) at 1152x864
resolution. Also, will 9800 make a difference on my system? I probably
will upgrade my CPU system next Fall (2004).

Thank you in advance.

IMO you don't have enough cpu to push the video card to the max. I have a
9700 pro on AMD xp2100 myself. However that not to say that its not worth
getting. I had been running an Nvidia GF3 before so you results may not be
as great as mine. What I have ended up doing is dropping the screen res to
1024x768, but uping the FSAA and AF settings. With my Nvidia card I would
leave the FSAA and AF off and use a higher screen res to get a nice picture.
Since I have went to the 9700 pro I get better performance from lighting the
load on my CPU with a lower res and with the 9700 pro doing the work with
the FSAA and AF I get a better image quality as well. A real win-win. So I
guess the "if its worth it" really comes down to what you have now.

MadDAWG

 

[ANTant]

IMO you don't have enough cpu to push the video card to the max. I have a
9700 pro on AMD xp2100 myself. However that not to say that its not worth
getting. I had been running an Nvidia GF3 before so you results may not be
as great as mine. What I have ended up doing is dropping the screen res to
1024x768, but uping the FSAA and AF settings. With my Nvidia card I would
leave the FSAA and AF off and use a higher screen res to get a nice picture.
Since I have went to the 9700 pro I get better performance from lighting the
load on my CPU with a lower res and with the 9700 pro doing the work with
the FSAA and AF I get a better image quality as well. A real win-win. So I
guess the "if its worth it" really comes down to what you have now.

OK, how about from GF4 Ti4200 to a ATI Radeon 9700 PRO on the same
machine? Will I see a big improvement. The problem with the 4200 I have.
I can max everything at 1152x864 or else the games become laggy like in
BF1942, C&C:G, etc.
--
"Lay a stick of bubble gum on an anthill for instant Siamese Ant
Twins." --unknown
/\___/\
/ /\ /\ \ Ant @ The Ant Farm: http://antfarm.ma.cx
| |o o| | E-mail: (e-mail address removed) or (e-mail address removed)
\ _ / Remove ANT if replying by e-mail from a newsgroup.
( )

 

[MadDAWG]

OK, how about from GF4 Ti4200 to a ATI Radeon 9700 PRO on the same

machine? Will I see a big improvement. The problem with the 4200 I have.
I can max everything at 1152x864 or else the games become laggy like in
BF1942, C&C:G, etc.

Sorry I really have no direct experiance with either the 4200 or those
games. From what I have read you should be able to run more levels of AF
and FSAA with better performance but thats not much more than a guess.

MadDAWG

 

[ANTant]

Sorry I really have no direct experiance with either the 4200 or those
games. From what I have read you should be able to run more levels of AF
and FSAA with better performance but thats not much more than a guess.

Yeah, my Ti4200 suffered a lot with AF and FSAA.

--
"Lay a stick of bubble gum on an anthill for instant Siamese Ant
Twins." --unknown
/\___/\
/ /\ /\ \ Ant @ The Ant Farm: http://antfarm.ma.cx
| |o o| | E-mail: (e-mail address removed) or (e-mail address removed)
\ _ / Remove ANT if replying by e-mail from a newsgroup.
( )

 

[methylenedioxy]

Yeah, my Ti4200 suffered a lot with AF and FSAA.

--
"Lay a stick of bubble gum on an anthill for instant Siamese Ant
Twins." --unknown
/\___/\
/ /\ /\ \ Ant @ The Ant Farm: http://antfarm.ma.cx
| |o o| | E-mail: (e-mail address removed) or (e-mail address removed)
\ _ / Remove ANT if replying by e-mail from a newsgroup.
( )

Might be able to help, almost same spec I had. I went from a geforce 4
ti4200 (gainward) to a hercules radeon 9700 pro with an xp2600. Big
difference in performance, I can now run ANY AA I want, I couldn't run any
games with AA on the geforce 4. Much, much bigger difference in quality.
Only thing is C and C generals, but that is just buggy badly written
software anyway, still doesn't run very well with radeon 9700 pro, just a
crap game really, every other game I have (medal of honour, vice city and
1942 for example) all run at 6XAA and 16X Anisotropic with v sync on, but I
run games at 1024X768 anyway, always have just to get the best performance
and quality........(1280X1024 looks too small on games for me, fine for
desktop though )

 

[MadDAWG]

One more plus to the ATI card is Trueform. If the game support is there its
as big of thing as FSAA. So far for me C&C Renagade is the only game I have
that uses it, but then again I'm mostly into sim racing.

MadDAWG

 

[J.Clarke]

On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 20:40:25 -0500

Since I am upgrading my video card once a year or so, I was wondering
if ATI 9700 is a little too much for my 1 year old CPU. You can see my
current system setup (primary computer) at
http://alpha.zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt ... I play a
lot of computer games, especially newer games. I am a type of guys
who likes to crank everything up (FSAA, details, etc.) at 1152x864
resolution. Also, will 9800 make a difference on my system? I probably
will upgrade my CPU system next Fall (2004).

"Full speed" as in the highest performance that it's possible to achieve
with that board, probably not--if the benchmarks I've seen using an
overclocked Athlon-64 are any indicator then it's got more capability
than any 32-bit processor can feed. "Full speed" as in will it be
faster than some less powerful board using the processor you have?
Depends on what you're doing but in general yes.